thanks for the quick response, ghee! > Presto has achieved what its has set out to do, > auto-detection of USB > nd network printer for LP. A lot of efforts from the > team to take it > thus far.
the printing team has much to be proud of here. i know of no other environment that does all of this -- including network printing -- so seamlessly. i walk into an office, my laptop grabs an IP address, seconds later i have new printers available. no application to launch, no dialogs to 'confirm,' no effort on the user's part of any kind. it's a wonderful feature, and is one of many i use to explain why i'm running opensolaris not only on my servers, but also on my desktop. just last night my family hooked up a new color laser onto our home network. by the time i had walked back to my laptop, it had already been configured. > Agreed. presto print manager was much better designed > much credits > should go to Calum Benson (GUI designer) who > designed the GUI. > system-config-printer is much more evolutional in > that it was first > modeled after the Web browser GUI of CUPS. the UI specifications and process calum and team have been put in place in the opensolaris desktop community have really led to a very polished product there. i'm not surprised at all to learn the presto print manager's GUI was his. > Have you tried system-config-printer, with the > SUNWhal-cups-utils > installed, detection of USB printer is automatic. It > also automatically > found other CUPS printers in the network if they have > been set to be > shared. It also can browse to access windows > printers. i have, and it does exactly as i would expect from my fedora days. it's a nice piece of kit, but i still have to open the application, setup a 'new printer' and then walk through the resultant dialogs once it finds one on the network. not much work, i'll grant you, but more than zero. ;) > I think extending presto GUI to CUPS and just to do > what > system-config-printer does I think is an duplicated > effort. So there is > no plan to do so. Unless of course if the maintainer > of > system-config-printer thinks Presto GUI is so nice > that they want it > for CUPS, a joint effort could be considered. The > fact is that > delivering and maintaining 2 apps doing pretty much > of same is hard to > justify. understood. it is a shame that the default for opensolaris going forward isn't the print system i would prefer, but i do realize that as most of those using printing services from a 'user' perspective are probably converts from linux, CUPS as a default was inevitable. those of us used to lpr will have something nice on the GUI side, it seems. i hope there aren't plans to phase out presto entirely. which does lead me to that question: i cannot imagine solaris every shipping without lpr; but as far as presto is concerned, will it be maintained going forward? in other words, between now and 'solaris next,' will presto still be around for those willing to switch over printing systems or is it planned to be dropped at some point in the immediate future? -- eldee (t/l 295-8943) -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
